September 6, 2008 7:35 am

This is why I love traveling: “Sir, we don’t have any overhead room for your luggage. We’ll have to gate check it. It’ll be waiting for you in Buffalo.” Except, it wasn’t waiting for me. I was waiting for it. And waited. And waited. And it never arrived. So head over to the luggage counter, where the door is locked and nobody is around. So I called the national line, where some guy in Bombay is answering the phone and we can’t understand each other, mostly because I don’t speak Bombayean. In the middle of that painful conversation, the luggage chick comes back from her “smoking break” but first has to deal with a lady from Warsaw, Poland whose luggage got stuck in Chicago. You can imagine how that conversation went. “How long have you been out of the country?” “Twenty years.” “NO, how long have you been gone on this trip?” “Oh, six days.” I think they were speaking Bombayean. Keep in mind, this is at midnight. Get through that drudgery and head over to the rental car counter, where they tell me my wheels are in stall C20. So I go down to the garage and it only goes up to C16. No C20. Anywhere. Well, maybe in LaGuardia, but that seems a little far to go to find my car. So I head back upstairs but it’s now past midnight and I am the last customer so they have already bolted. Like Usain. So I head back down to the garage and start hitting the automatic unlock device on my keychain hoping to hear the “boop boop beep.” I don’t hear it, but fortunately the headlights go on and off. The car was in F20. Check into the hotel. I have not eaten since taking off from Sea-Tac at 1. “Oh, no sir, our room service closed at 11. You should have called ahead and we could have had food waiting for you in your room when you arrived.” Hmm, soggy hamburgers at 1 in the morning. Sounds good. So I head across the street to a place called Jacks Bar and Grill, and the only thing they are serving is — this is beautiful, given the locale — Buffalo Wings. Hot, Hotter and Hottest. Of course. So my nether regions are a little on fire this morning. I think I have to head up to Niagara Falls to cool them off. I hope the concierge speaks more than Bombayean so I can get proper directions.

Before that, though, I wanted to point out a few things. The story in the Buffalo News this morning says Bills left tackle Jason Peters definitely will not be playing against the Seahawks tomorrow, which means Lawrence Jackson gets Langston Walker and Patrick Kerney gets Kirk Chambers (who I think I called Kirk Cameron earlier in the week). Next in line after that is rookie Demetrius Bell, a seventh-round draft pick.

Also, I posted a story the other day about linebacker Angelo Crowell having surgery on his knee, forcing him to miss this game. Well, I guess the Bills didn’t know he was getting the surgery, and they are so pissed at him that they cleared out his locker and gave it to a guy they just signed. Here is a link to the story.

Also, the Seahawks had a very uneventful trip here. Took them all of four hours to make the cross-country trek and they arrived in a timely fashion last night — before room service closed. They’ll have a walk-through that is closed to the media at Ralph Wilson Stadium today. The weather here is rather Seattle-like, gray, cloudy and occasional rain, about 65 degrees. They should feel right at home. I know I do — except for the no-clothes part.

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Gregg Bell joined The News Tribune in July 2014. Bell had been the director of writing for the University of Washington's athletic department for four years. He was the senior national sports writer in Seattle for The Associated Press from 2005-10, covering the Seahawks in their first Super Bowl season and beyond. He's also been The Sacramento Bee's beat writer on the Oakland Athletics and Raiders. The native of Steubenville, Ohio, is a 1993 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and a 2000 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.

Good coverage, given the circumstances. Sympathize with you, Frank, really do–I love to travel but not that way! But maybe it’s all just part of that old thing called responsibility, which really means they’re paying you to put up with whatever s*** is required to do it, etc.

Hope the game–and the season!–is what we all hope for: another strong team, and one that (finally) they can win on the road in the East.

Frank
I’m thankful that you are willing to go through all that to keep this blog alive. You would think that if we are able to put things on other planets that we could get luggage to the appropriate destination on time.
Go Hawks!!!!

I really love to be places and love to be on vacations and all that sort of thing, but I just hate the actual process of travel. I hate airports, I hate airplanes, “luggage chicks”, TSA dorks, rental car guys…

The only people that don’t irritate me are the boarding agents and flight attendants because they have the worst jobs in the world and I feel sorry for them. I can only imagine how badly I’d act if I had their job.

Anyway, great post Frank. I hope the rest of the trip and the rest of the season goes better.

I grew up near Buffalo (Washingtonian and Seahawks fan since 1990) so this Hawks-Bills matchup is my favorite game whenever it happens. Gives me the chance to brag on the phone to my brothers after the Seahawks win!

And, man I sure do miss REAL BUFFALO WINGS! If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. I survived college eating little else (well, ther was beer).

The call center could easily have been in Mumbai. Or Pune or Bangalore. Chennai has a lot too of course.
I went over there last year to help my company outsource some American jobs. Somebody had to do it.

You all need to realize they aren’t there to help you. They are just there to keep you from bothering anyone who works for the company in the US.

anyway, I took a look at our record in home openers during the holmgren era. Would you be surprised to hear we have a winning record in such games, including 4-2 in road openers that kickoff at 10 AM PST? I was.

Now THAT was funny! I wonder if that place you called is the same building Dell has their “tech support” at. When my computer crashed about 3 weeks ago (thanks to some trojan that got in while I was surfing porn sites–another reason to hate USC) I had to “talk” to 3 or 4 different people because no one person could take care of everything (one specialized in drivers, and he was the most English challenged–if that is the “official” language in India, you’d think they’d be more proficeint with it–then again you’d think more people in this country would be).

If the interior run defense doesn’t get it’s scatalogical reference together, the only injury Edwards will suffer will be carpel tunnel from handing the ball off to Lynch and Jackson all day.

After reading that story about Crowell, I have a feeling that if the Bills release him once his knee is healed after the scope (and he has no reason to hurry it now that he’s on IR so he can drag this out and get his whole $1.3 million for the season, which I would do in his place) he’ll be waiting for the off season to have his agent make calls to other teams. And that first call is likely to be to Bill Belichick.

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